The Fire Sermon Page 2

  At first, in the struggle to repopulate, the onslaught of twins must have been greeted with joy. So many babies, and so many of them normal. There was always one boy and one girl, with one from each pair perfect. Not just well formed, but strong, robust. But soon the fatal symmetry became evident; the price to be paid for each perfect baby was its twin. They came in many different forms: limbs missing, or atrophied, or occasionally multiplied. Absent eyes, extra eyes, or eyes sealed shut. These were the Omegas, the shadow counterparts to the Alphas. The Alphas called them mutants, said they were the poison that Alphas cast out, even in the womb. The stain of the blast that, while it couldn’t be removed, had at least been displaced onto the lesser twin. The Omegas carried the burden of the mutations, leaving the Alphas unencumbered.

  Not entirely unencumbered, though. While the difference between twins was visible, the link between them was not. But it nonetheless asserted itself, every time, in the most unanswerable way. It made no difference that nobody could understand how it worked. At first, they might have dismissed it as coincidence. But gradually, disbelief was overruled by fact, by the evidence of bodies. The twins came in pairs, and they died in pairs. Wherever they were, and no matter how far apart, whenever someone died, their twin died, too.

  Extreme pain, too, or serious illness, would affect both twins. A high fever in one twin would soon peak in the other; if one twin was knocked out, the other would lose consciousness as well, wherever he or she was. Minor injuries or sickness didn’t seem to bridge the divide, but severe pain would see one twin wake, screaming, from the other twin’s wound.

  When it became clear that Omegas were infertile, it was assumed for a while that they would die out. That they were only a temporary blight, a readjustment after the blast. But each generation since then was the same: all twins, always one Alpha and one Omega. Only Alphas could produce children, but each child they produced came with its Omega twin.

  When Zach and I were born, a perfect match, our parents must have counted and recounted: limbs, fingers, toes. The complete set. They would have been disbelieving, though; nobody dodged the split between Alpha and Omega. Nobody. It wasn’t unheard of for an Omega to have a deformation that only became apparent later: one leg that refused to grow in tandem with the other; deafness that passed unnoticed in infancy; an arm that turned out to be stunted or weak. But there were also rumors, all over, about those few whose difference never showed itself physically: the boy who seemed normal until he screamed and ran from the cottage minutes before the roof beam’s sudden collapse; the girl who wept over the shepherd’s dog a week before the cart from the next village ran it down. These were the Omegas whose mutation was invisible: the seers. They were rare—only one in every few thousand, if that. Everybody knew of the seer who came to the market each month at Haven, the big town downstream. Although Omegas weren’t permitted at the Alpha market, he’d been tolerated for years, lurking at the back of the stalls, behind the stacked crates and the mounds of spoiled vegetables. By the time I first went to the market he was old but still plying his trade, charging a bronze coin in exchange for predicting next season’s weather to farmers, or telling a merchant’s daughter whom she’d end up marrying. But he was always odd: he muttered to himself steadily, an unending incantation. Once, when Zach and I walked past with Dad, the seer shouted, “Fire. Forever fire.” The stallholders nearby didn’t even flinch—evidently such outbursts were common. That was the fate of most seers: the blast burned its way through minds as they were forced to relive it.

  I don’t know when I first realized my own difference, but I was old enough to know that it had to be hidden. In the early years, I was as oblivious as my parents. What child doesn’t wake, screaming, from a bad dream? It took a long time for me to understand that there was something different about my dreams. The consistency of my dreams of the blast. The way that I’d dream of a storm that wouldn’t arrive until the following night. How the details and scenes in my dreams extended far beyond my own experience of the village, its forty or so stone houses clustered around the central green with its stone-rimmed well. All I had ever known was this shallow valley, the houses and the wooden barns grouped a hundred feet from the river, high enough up to avoid the floods that drenched the fields with rich silt each winter. But my dreams thronged with unfamiliar landscapes and strange faces. Forts that loomed ten times the height of our own small house with its rough-sanded floors and low, beamed ceilings. Cities with streets wider than the river itself and swollen with crowds.

  By the time I was old enough to wonder at this, I was old enough to know that Zach was sleeping through each night, undisturbed. In the cot that we shared, I taught myself to lie in silence, to calm my frenzied breathing. When the visions came in the daytime, especially the roaring flash of the blast, I learned not to cry out. The first time Dad took us downstream to Haven, I recognized the jostling market square from my dreams, but when I saw Zach hang back and grip Dad’s hand, I imitated my brother’s dumbfounded stare.

  So our parents waited. Like all parents, they’d made only a single cot for us, expecting to send one child away as soon as we’d been split and weaned. When, at three, we remained stubbornly unsplit, our father built a pair of larger beds. Although our neighbor Mick was known throughout the valley for his skill at carpentry, this time Dad didn’t ask for his help. He built the beds himself, almost furtively, in the small walled yard outside the kitchen window. In the years that followed, whenever my lopsided, ill-made bed creaked I remembered the expression on Dad’s face when he’d dragged the beds into the room, setting them as far apart as the narrow walls would allow.

  Mom and Dad hardly spoke to us anymore. Those were the drought years, when everything was rationed, and it seemed to me that even words had become scarce. In our valley, where the low-lying fields were usually flooded every winter, the river thinned to an apathetic trickle, the exposed riverbed on each side cracked like old pottery. Even in our well-off village there was nothing to spare. Our harvests were poor the first two years, and in the third year without rain the crops failed altogether, and we lived off hoarded coins. The dried-up fields were scoured by dust. Some of the livestock died—there was no animal feed to buy, even for those with coins. There were stories of people starving, farther east. The Council sent patrols through all the villages, to protect against Omega raids. That was the summer they erected the wall around Haven, and most of the larger Alpha towns. But the only Omegas I glimpsed in those years, passing our village on the way to the refuges, looked too thin and weary to threaten anyone.

  Even when the drought had broken, the Council patrols continued. Mom and Dad’s vigilance didn’t change, either. The slightest difference between me and Zach was anticipated, seized on, and dissected. When we both came down with the winter fever, I overheard my parents’ long discussion about who had sickened first. I must have been six or seven. Through the floor of our bedroom I could hear, from the kitchen below, my father’s loud insistence that I’d looked flushed the night before, a good ten hours before both Zach and I had woken with our fevers peaking in perfect unison.

  That was when I realized that Dad’s wariness around us was distrust, not habitual gruffness; that Mom’s constant watchfulness was something other than maternal devotion. Zach used to follow Dad around all day, from the well to the field to the barn. As we grew older, and Dad became prickly and wary with us, he began to shoo Zach away, shouting at him to get back to the house. Still Zach would find excuses to tail him when he could. If Dad was gathering fallen wood from the copse upstream, Zach would drag me there, too, to search for mushrooms. If Dad was harvesting in the maize field, Zach would find a sudden enthusiasm for fixing the broken gate to the next paddock. He kept a safe distance, but trailed our father like an oddly misplaced shadow.

  At night I clenched my eyes shut when Mom and Dad would talk about us, as if that would block out the voices that seeped through the floorboards. In the bed against the opposite wall I could hear Zach shi
ft slightly, and the unhurried rhythm of his breathing. I didn’t know if he was asleep or just pretending.

  “You’ve seen something new.”

  I scanned the cell’s gray ceiling to avoid the Confessor’s eyes. Her questions were always like this: phrased blankly, as statements, as if she already knew everything. Of course, I could never be sure that she didn’t. I knew, myself, what it was to catch glimpses of other people’s thoughts, or to be woken by memories that weren’t my own. But the Confessor wasn’t just a seer; she used her power knowingly. Each time she came to the cell, I could feel her mind circling mine. I’d always refused to talk to her, but I was never sure how much I succeeded in concealing.

  “Just the blast. The same.”

  She unclasped and reclasped her hands. “Tell me something you haven’t told me twenty times before.”

  “There’s nothing. Just the blast.”

  I searched her face, but it revealed nothing of what she knew. I’m out of practice, I thought. Too long in the cell, cut off from people. And anyway, the Confessor was inscrutable. I tried to concentrate. Her face was nearly as pale as mine had become over the long months in the cell. The brand was somehow more conspicuous on her face than on others’, because the rest of her features were so imperturbable. Her skin as smooth as a polished river pebble, except for the tight redness of the brand, puckering at the center of her forehead. It was hard to tell her age. If you just glanced at her, you might think her the same age as me and Zach. To me, however, she seemed decades older: it was the intensity of her stare, the powers that it barely concealed.

  “Zach wants you to help me.”

  “Then tell him to come himself. Tell him to see me.”

  The Confessor laughed. “The guards told me you screamed his name for the first few weeks. Even now, after three months in here, you really think he’s going to come?”

  “He’ll come,” I said. “He’ll come eventually.”

  “You seem certain of that,” she said. She cocked her head slightly. “Are you certain that you want him to?”

  I would never explain to her that it wasn’t a matter of wanting, any more than a river wants to move downstream. How could I explain to her that he needed me, even though I was the one in the cell?

  I tried to change the subject.

  “I don’t even know what you want,” I said. “What you think I can do.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re like me, Cass. Which means I know what you’re capable of, even if you won’t admit it.”

  I tried a strategic concession. “It’s been more frequent. The blast.”

  “Unfortunately I doubt that you can have much valuable information to give us about something that happened four hundred years ago.”

  I could feel her mind probing at the edges of mine. It was like unfamiliar hands on my body. I tried to emulate her inscrutability, to close my mind.

  The Confessor sat back. “Tell me about the island.”

  She’d spoken quietly, but I had to hide my shock that I had been infiltrated so easily. I had only begun to see the island in the last few weeks, since the last trip to the ramparts. The first few times I dreamed of it, I’d doubted myself, wondered if those glimpses of sea and sky were a fantasy rather than a vision. Just a daydream of open space, to counteract the contraction of my daily reality into those four gray walls, the narrow bed, the single chair. But the visions came too regularly, and were too detailed and consistent. I knew that what I had seen was real, just as I knew that I could never speak of it. Now, in the overbearing silence of the room, my own breathing sounded loud.

  “I’ve seen it, too, you know,” she said. “You will tell me.”

  I tried to seal my mind around those images: the island, the city concealed in its caldera, houses clambering on one another up the steep sides. The water, merciless gray, stretching in all directions, pocked by outcrops of sharp stone. I could see it all, as I’d seen it many nights in my dreams. I tried to think of myself as holding its secret inside my mouth, the same way the island nursed the secret city, nestled in the crater.

  Standing, I said, “There is no island.”

  The Confessor stood, too. “You’d better hope not.”

  As we grew older the scrutiny of our parents was matched only by that of Zach himself. To him, every day we weren’t split was another day he was branded by the suspicion of being an Omega, another day he was prevented from assuming his rightful place in Alpha society. So, unsplit, the two of us lingered at the margins of village life. When other children went to school, we studied together at the kitchen table. When other children played together by the river, we played only with each other, or followed the others at a distance, copying their games. Keeping far enough away to avoid the other children shouting or throwing stones at us, Zach and I could only hear fragments of the rhymes they sang. Later, at home, we would try to echo them, filling in the gaps with our own invented words and lines. We existed in our own small orbit of suspicion. To the rest of the village, we were objects of curiosity and, later, outright hostility. After a while, the whispers of the neighbors ceased being whispers and became shouts: “Poison. Freak. Imposter.” They didn’t know which one of us was dangerous, so they despised us equally. Each time another set of twins was born in the village, and then split, our unsplit state became more conspicuous. Our neighbors’ Omega son, Oscar, whose left leg ended at the knee, was sent away at nine months old to be cared for by Omega relatives. We often passed the remaining twin, little Meg, playing alone in the fenced yard of their house.

  “She must miss her twin,” I said to Zach as we walked by, watching Meg chewing listlessly on the head of a small wooden horse.

  “Sure,” he said. “I bet she’s devastated that she doesn’t have to share her life with a freak anymore.”

  “He must miss his family, too.”

  “Omegas don’t have family,” he said, repeating the familiar line from one of the Council posters. “Anyway, you know what happens to parents who try to hang on to their Omega kids.”

  I’d heard the stories. The Council showed no mercy to the occasional parent who resisted the split and tried to keep both twins. It was the same for those rare Alphas who were found to be in a relationship with an Omega. There were rumors of public floggings, and worse. But most parents relinquished their Omega babies readily, eager to be rid of their deformed offspring. The Council taught that prolonged proximity to Omegas was dangerous. The neighbors’ hisses of poison revealed both disdain and fear. Omegas needed to be cast out of Alpha society, just as the poison was cast out of the Alpha twin in the womb. Was that the one thing Omegas are spared? I wondered. Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.

  I knew my time to be sent away was coming and that my secrecy was only deferring the inevitable. I’d even begun to wonder whether my current existence—the perpetual scrutiny of my parents and the rest of the village—was any better than the exile that was bound to follow. Zach was the one person who understood my odd, liminal life, because he shared it. But I felt his dark, calm eyes on me all the time.

  In search of less watchful company, I’d caught three of the red beetles that always flocked by the well. I kept them in a jar on the windowsill, had enjoyed seeing them crawl about and hearing the muted clatter of their wings against the glass. A week later I found the largest one pinned to the wooden sill, one wing gone, making an endless circle on the pivot of its guts.

  “It was an experiment,” said Zach. “I wanted to test how long it could live like that.”

  I told our parents. “He’s just bored,” my mother said. “It’s driving him crazy, the two of you not being in school like you should be.” But the unspoken truth continued to circle, like the beetle stuck on the pin: only one of us would ever be allowed to go to school.

  I squashed the beetle myself, with the heel of my shoe, to put an end to its circular torment. That night, I took the jar and the two remaining beetles with me
to the well. When I removed the lid and tipped the jar on its side, they were reluctant to venture out. I coaxed them out with a blade of grass, transferring them carefully to the stone rim on which I sat. One attempted a short flight, landing on my bare leg. I let it sit there for a while before blowing it gently back into flight.

  Zach saw the empty jar that night, beside my bed. Neither of us said anything.

  About a year later, gathering firewood by the river on a still afternoon, I made my mistake. I was walking just behind Zach when I sensed something: a part glimpse of a vision, intruding between the real world and my sight. I dashed to catch up with him, knocked him out of the way before the branch had even begun to fall. It was an instinctive response, the kind I’d grown used to repressing. Later I would wonder whether it was fear for his safety that led to my lapse, or just exhaustion under the constant scrutiny. Either way, he was safe, sprawled beneath me on the path, by the time the massive bough creaked and fell, snagging and tearing off other branches on the way down, to land finally where Zach had stood earlier.

  When his eyes met mine I was amazed at the relief in them.

  “It wouldn’t have done much damage,” I said.

  “I know.” He helped me up, brushed some leaves off the side of my dress.

  “I saw it.” I was speaking too quickly. “Saw it starting to fall, I mean.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” he said. “And I should thank you, for getting me out of the way.” For the first time in years, he was smiling at me in the unguarded, wide-mouthed way that I remembered from our early childhood. I knew him too well to be glad.

  He insisted on adding my own bundle of firewood to his, carrying the whole load all the way back to the village. “I owe you,” he said.

  In the weeks that followed we passed most of the time together, the same as always, but he was less rough in our games. He waited for me on the walk to the well. When we took the shortcut across the field, he called behind to warn me when he came across a patch of stinging nettles. My hair went unpulled, my possessions undisturbed.